Beryl Bainbridge

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize: A masterwork of love, guilt, and friendship set in Victorian Liverpool and Eastern Europe during the Crimean War.   Photography is the common thread weaving together three different points of view that span the years from 1846 to 1854. The first "plate" opens with the account of Myrtle, a young orphan girl, as she is taking a photograph of her adoptive father, Mr. Hardy, who has just passed away in Liverpool....

"In the tumultuous spring of 1968 a young English woman, Rose, travels from London to the United States to meet a man she knows as Washington Harold. In her suitcase are a polka dot dress and a one-way ticket. In an America recently convulsed by the April assassination of Martin Luther King and subsequent urban riots, they begin a search for the charismatic and elusive Dr. Wheeler - sage, prophet and, possibly, redeemer - who rescued Rose from a dreadful...